Xenonauts - Bursters of the Filter Bubble

Social Media has created algorithms for filtering the streams of content people get to what they like, resulting in everyone mostly getting what they like to see with a dash of the old stress doctor's dose of daily horrors.
Time to get out of the Matrix of social media based mind control! Proposing a term for people who want to meet other people outside of their personal friend zone and feel xenophilia towards the different - xenonaut, a person who explores friendship with all sorts of different people.
Keeping such an acquaintance list varied and fun may be one of the pieces of the puzzle of the strange effect of social media causing teenage stress and adult depression. It could be a way out - off the controlled tramlines that emotionally engineer regular, predictable engagement from the users.

Two types of spiritual experiences

1. Opening Experience - new ideas come to mind, instantly as insights or epiphanies
2. Closing Experience -  shuts off vision and replaces them with hallucinations, enstasy (bright blackness) or bright white light.  

Demonetising, Dematerialising, Delegalising, Demilitarising, Decentralizing the State

If technology can demonetise a whole economy by the blockchained bitcoin,
turn the locked-up and unused assets of a state and all its individuals free for use by all in a frenzy of middlemanless sharing and collaboration economy of dematerialisation, while peer production reaches the everyman and provides low cost production facilities, the legal offices are replaced by blockchain notaries; is there any room for anything other than an anarchic pluralist network of tribes?
Bitcoin also removes inflation from the economy is used as the main currency. It may even remove banks from the loop. Without inflation the real estate rentier class would lose significant opportunity to acquire wealth.
No money, no property, no law, no religion are the foundations of anarchism.
Or perhaps technology will stop at getting us to this route to eutopia because it might not provide solutions to religious thought? Or maybe cognitive research and cognitive prosthesis will in the future allow for religious experiences at will?
Or allow for amazing new spiritual experiences once souls have been digitalized by uploading? Maybe the communion will acquire a totally new meaning when it merges with the egoless state of being when the global mind is first used to unite a dozen odd pioneers of electronic/optronic neural prostheses to share ego-ness as a collective experience of all members?

Processes of Political Schools

Each school of politics has its main principles and its main Process which combines the practices into one flow.

Hereby two Processes are demonstrated:

Process of Communism, the Classical Process

1. Exploitation of the workers causes massive social economic disparity
2. Proletarians learn about exploitation by the owners from the vanguard - class consciousness awakens in the proletariat.
3. Proletarians revolt against the bourgeois and the exploitation
4. A revolution displaces the owners with councils by a violent overthrow, owners and managers are imprisoned and executed after showtrials.The capitalist state is dismantled and replaced by a union of councils to rule in equality
5. People are forced to improve the state by compulsory labour
6. Free education, universal employment and medical care eliminate poverty
7. The worker's state is run by a single party, middlemen, a glorious genius of a leader runs the party and the state happily ever after
8. (When the revolutionary vanguard dies away the system fades and capitalism returns OR Communist Society - free from exploitation is constructed by technological means) 
9. Competition between communist states opens up a possibility for war in addition to paranoia against capitalist spies prying on the workers' state from the outside
10.  Socialist economies are formed and maintained by equality of all members 
11. Equality is enforced as a primary aim for society, without it some with less capital are always with less liberty.

   

Process of Liberalism 

1. Rule by a master-slave ethic forms massive social disparities 
2. Education enlightens the peoples' blight under the tyranny of aristocrats 
3. People revolt against the aristocrats 
4. People are free to do as they please - work for others or engage in business
5. People are allowed to improve their social standing by amelioration. While self-development is not enforced, disparity increases - as some own the means of production and others use these machines  for the betterment of the financial standing of the owners
6. The poor are helped by philanthropy
7. Various freedoms (press, gathering, religion, etc) serve as the foundational to the state constition, while the resulting applications cause problems solved by law as all are considered equal under the law
8. A liberal state is run democratically
9. Peaceful diplomacy is the favoured means of concourse between other liberal states so that production builds on ever more prosperity. War can be a source of profit if other nations are pushed into wars, serving the financial interests of the owners of military industries in liberal countries
10. Democratic and open societies are formed and maintained by freedom
11. Liberty is enforced as the primary aim for society, without it there is no choice for any sense of equality.

These two processes do not live by themselves, they intermingle and influence each other in many ways. It is beneficial for states of either processes to form unions so as to protect themselves from the ill-influence of the other states eg in warmongering and divide and conquer style strategies while also improving the economic well-being in the economy over-all.

Tragedy for alt-right : A Dream Come True

As the right and the extreme right contains in it the kernel meme that justifies hate and glorifies aggression. It falls into the category of the evil counterpart in the political stage. While a common description of a tragedy gistifies that as a stage play where the good side loses, and the bad side enjoys a victory of some sort. Hence the right wants a tragedy to live by. What a farce! 

Madness Among the Regular Size Life

What if the human social condition necessitates a certain normalisation of experience and feeling and sensitivity to emotions. So normal people do not hear what is said/commented about them in public venues. Normal people are filtering out their emotional experiences and empathise little with others so as to please the social condition they are presented with. After all some people are several times more accurate in reading other's demeanour. Why do we not have it available for everyone, what if is it a latent superpower suppressed by the need for normalcy? Perhaps we can´t be too different so that the social sphere would work for as many people as possible so that as many would be infected by the requirement to be normal.
Madness defined as all forms of mental problems that disobey the rule to conform to the norm now has a strong twin appearing in the shape of the irrationality of accepting those who have the superempathic, superemotional, superintelligent, superolphactory and superoptical powers and not just accepting them but uplifting everyone´s abilities, skills and powers to those levels.
There are likeable elements to the indie/alternative movement that was live in the 90s. As an art it only provided a slogan to live by "Make your own kind of music." A paraphrase suggests itself: Make your own superpower to pursue! It´s not mad to strive for a level up, so let´s make a mad dash for it.

The Gigaannum Project

1. Live long enough to populate the Galaxy
2. Save as many noospheric planets from supernovae in this Galaxy as possible.
3. Save as many galaxies from galaxy collisions as possible
4. If possible engineer an extension to the lifetime of the Universe, if not seek out an escape to other multiverses/xenoverses

Masquerade

The problem of collective class unconsciousness

Why do people in their large numbers not rebel against the conditions of their miserable being in comparison to the opulent being of the ruling minority? How are they duped to such an extent that they serve in the military to support that establishment of the capitalist system, or inspire people through the media with fantasies along with rare and occasional successes through amelioration and self development, or 'think different' until they serve time in the prison system or rehab system to do slave servitude? 

An Archetypal Metaphor of the Masquerade

There are three agents:
Mask makers - those who shape the roles and the world view stories in such a way that wearing the mask becomes an inevitability.
Mask wearers - those who mask the true power or poverty of their existence, the mask shapes the expressed desires and aims according to the establishment
Mask pullers - those who unmask the nature of reality, vital for the consciousness of class to emerge for them to steer towards acting in their true interests.

While the mask puller may work in unison with the revolutionary, if those work iterations are longer and of smaller magnitude than the establishment's mask makers', the status quo with the class unconsciousness remains. This effect is then repeated and the Grand Illusion, that everything is fine, acceptable and unchangeable - permeates the culture.


This is an update of the storyteller/exposer metaphor.

Recursive Independence

  An ideal where the independence movement spawns further independence movements and new states to form. One conclusion of such a movement of successive waves of secession, taken to its extreme limit, is that everyone is a state to his-her own. One should notice that the concept of the model of a social contract for a social group would vanish at the this point. The anarchist-surrealists may call this a mass monarchy - where everyone is a regent albeit without sovereigns. An additional side thought: may-be let such monarchs be equipped with a collective of DOAs and a swarm of artilects in a decentralized cloud which are interfacing the real (world) through robotics.

  See this work in the erosion of the nation states that appeared in the first wave  The Breakdown of the Colonial World, some nations have now been further split into smaller states without international acknowledgement or recognition, with the support of the former colonial power. This involution of power returns power to the old colonial countries, cements capitalism in its most deceptive and destructive form and continues to haunt the free world and its open enclaves.

 Balkanisation or division of states and/or subdivision of the result into warring states that derive their support from former colonial powers that vie for power and engage in the use of force to complete their grand aim of existence: to indulge in their lust for power. It always comes with a human cost.

  While the west has succumbed to corruption of its freedoms and ideals and a totalitarian age has dawned again, resurfacing through another form of erosion - an erosion of liberty, freedom from snooping and algorithm-based mind control. Is the pressure of such change creating a new desire for privacy, the tools for it and the drive in society to accomplish the sufficient protection of liberty soon enough? Before we lose them for good.
  The blockchain economy is offering just such a toolset for liberating the individual from control by the selfish elites. But an interesting, if fiendish paradox arises. When snooping and algorithm-based programmed social media is a computer controlled system of control of humanity, why would we trust another code for liberating us. One potential answer to some may well suggest to be the tangential ideas of anarcho-primitivism.

An Insight Always Incites an Insurrection

An insurrection here means the escape of the prevailing dogma, a teaching that restrains the human into a straight-jacket of legal, allowed and accepted behaviours. The escape maybe impossible but a step into the unknown territory [plot in French] is a necessity for any progress to occur. Such a step outside the norm of the labyrinth trail run is a constant challenge for the limit-busting and trend-breaking pioneers.
It is often a case that truly outside the box thinking and living requires a secrecy concealed by a code in communications. The need for that is mostly the real threat of distraction of those following the dogma without seeing the true inner ruleset until the destruction of the real into a desolate desert reaches completion and hence a new journey for the world is dawning. 
Almost all insights bring with them a vast unhinge that reverberates through the grandest and the smallest minutiae of the fabric of history. Just like the results, that completely alter the shape of history, of steps taken off the beaten path, the outcome of an insight will reverberate through the reality as well as mould it to a new form.

The Invisible Beauty of Code

There is quite a paradox in software development. We see the program rarely do people read some of the source code for the programs they use. There is a major barrier for that: namely inability to read syntax and understand what the given code does. Sometimes the meaning in code is confusing to programmers themselves and it occurs to most programmers that after a while their own code becomes difficult to understand.
At the same time most programmers know and see very well written programs and good quality code. Yes, cleanliness is a factor but there are several others too. Yet people outside the discipline of software development haven't the foggiest of ideas as to whether the code is beautiful or not.
This is quite different in art. Most people can see beautiful art in its full glory, in its enticing and mesmerising power. Code is hidden.
There is something obvious that can be done to improve the situation even though at the moment it is rather utopian: teach every computer user to program and open up as much code for inspection as possible, rate code perhaps even.
A further step might be to create metrics for evaluating the aesthetics of code, however that may turn out to be an impossible task seeing that most programming languages evolve and take on new features and qualities that interact with each other in novel and unexpected ways, so that many evaluations would be immeasurable or unobjective.

What does Learned Morality Mean?

Most religions have the concept in them that they have a divine source for morality: do not steal, lie, murder, covet, etc and perhaps also a few rules which are positive. However recent investigations have uncovered that morality in humans is neither inborn nor accessible through numinous experience, instead it is based on the experiences of human social interactions, empathy, trading blows, emotional development in short moral principles are a development by experience.
This brings a great turn to a Nietzschean teaching of the need to reevaluate and turn on its head the morality of the church. Suddenly there is no such need.  On the other hand the common morality is shown to be under a false guardianship by the church.  This needs to be corrected, light should be shined on this misrepresentation. The real reason why most all civilizations have morality is not because of divine illumination or teaching, it is the result of learning in every human.

Moonshot Pursuit

A god-sim or civilization type game app that would help people collectively mod themselves simulations of future technologies' effects on their lives and help understand exponential growth and abundance of ideas, their intermixing and confluence in forming new conflicts to be avoided and thus obviated in real life.

Moonshot Project: Peace On Earth

As the system of wars and arms dealing and so on is of irrational cause, nil ends and only serves a minority that has power that rarely come to harm from such events in history yet great many people do get hurt by a great and grave deal whenever wars break out, it is of imminent and urgent reason to raise a plan to plot an end to such a system.
What would contribute to an actual, measurable reduction of wars in history?
An app that would make it possible to connect, educate in a language, economically ameliorate, uplift emotionally, empathize and grow compassion among peoples, in short - a comprehensive app for building peace.

Distributed Protest Contracts and Related Platforms

A form of public protests, a nonviolent campaign could take advantage of smart contracts and decentralized pseudonymised blockchains.
For example an issue for protests may raise  a campaign on a platform where users can set up a contract of non-communication and non-engagement in business against agents of aggression or complicitors to injustice and then propagate that protest so that the aggressors would be castigated and hopefully "sent to Coventry" by popular vote/support and distributed counterattack to the aggressors' wrongdoings.

Two important issues are raised, first the protesters have to limit their counterattacks to reasonable levels cutting off water or sanitation needs may be overly excessive, and it may be difficult to define what is reasonable for a just punishment and secondly what would form a deterrent against wrongdoings when would the counterattack itself be of unjust nature against a minority group.

Right to Property, Right to Tax

Hayek maintains that the state should not interfere in personal affairs of a citizen with progressive taxation for example. How would that not interfere with the concept that all should be equal before the law.

One potential answer is that the owner of property who makes an income from profit is not on an equal standing with the person who has no property in the first place. That the libertarian state itself forms at least two tiers of the society. Establishing progressive taxes would only change the two tiers somewhat. However it would still act as a parasite that would die with the host if the owner class was ever removed completely. Such alleviation of the conditions of the working class that a progressive tax establishes may never be sufficient to entirely remove the divide in society, but it would act to stabilise it as long as it is effective.

If the aim is to treat everyone equally for tax then on what basis would some be allowed to levy profits from both the work hour price and the market price forming a silent and extralegal taxation of all others- the workers as well as the consumers.

Another consideration of the inequality of the owners is that they have always a better recourse to advanced legal defence and tax optimisation expertise since they are the ones with more money.

The Act of Silence

silence in art :

silence in music: the pause
Mozart: The greatest music is no music.
Mozart used the grand pause to great effect.

Varese,

Sibelius
“The gestation of the [8th] symphony may have been long and troubled, but Sibelius had, at various times, referred to his manuscript as ‘brilliant,’ ‘a great work in the making,’ a piece that would have been ‘the reckoning of [his] whole existence.’ For so long, he had had but one desire: to finish the piece before drifting off ‘to the final silence.’ Why, then, did Sibelius destroy such a highly anticipated and promising work? This remains one of the most perplexing questions in all of music history.” --from www.artsjournal.com/2016/03

silence in writing:
There are three types of silence, a writer's block, a recalcitrant protest against writing and finally perhaps a nihilist absurdity of writing into the deluge of online scribbles: the "Age of the Fueilleton" has dawned - the blogosphere is here.

silence in philosophy:
Speech is silver, but silence is golden
Socrates, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein all have made contributions to this topic.

silence in the mind: meditation, breathe.

silence of the end:
Since this piece is made in silence, it will fade into itself. An interesting

Protecting Nonviolence

While Glederloos countered nonviolence as a tactic of cowardice  (reference needed) it can be countered on three terms. First one needs valiance to counter a stronger force of weaponry and militant power. Secondly one who wields nonviolence cannot renounce violence if there is no possibility to resort to violence (Gandhi). Thirdly, the foolhardiness of irresponsible use of force against another power always comes to reap a mindless sacrifice on humanity with the dishonorable gamble to win quickly.
As a conclusion one cannot see into the emotional life of an activist, but only cowardice on the field of historical, political and economic life is the reluctance to use nonviolence consistently and the ignorance in developing ever new methods of nonviolent resistance when all but the violent methods have been exhausted as viable political recourses.

Motherly philosophy, Fatherly philosophy

Philosophical discourse and development towards its aim, be it truth, progress or power or other goals always have the opponent and the proponent sides for every thesis.
Another view would be to see a fatherly side that guards and attacks the opponents both in prophylactic and preemptive strikes as well as countering moves after the theory has been challenged.
In opposition there would be the motherly side that grows and nurtures the theory. Communication patterns are different between the theory and the two methods of development.
Both sides are necessary for the development and utilisation of the theory.
The theory itself is the existential child of the two processes, the motherly and the fatherly.

Hero as a Gamer

In reading Thomas Carlyle I came to think of an additional type of a hero at first. I also came to think of whether the progress of different forms of a Hero forms a pattern. I am curious and find it a topic of further interest.
As the player of a computer game assumes the role of a Hero in some Tournament games the player competes for large sums of real money, yet he performs nothing real other than some excitement in the spectators of the game. Usually the spectators are also players. The winners who then become Heroes in the course of the Game in the virtual world do achieve both extrinsic as well as intrinsic rewards. The birth of this form of a gamer does not however begin with the computer age. The basic form is inherent in the sportsmen of the ancient era. The game is defined and enhanced in the age of telecommunication where the clear distinction appears between the games heroes and the spectators and is perfected further at the time of the information age.
Our times have turned many ordinary persons, even the young, into hero status by the virtues of fast and clever strategies needed to win the games. As the gamification of the real gains numbers of followers we all become competitors against our former self, because to win others is to make a victory over our former selves.
The gamer cannot do without a games designer, I would call that another type of hero one of a world-builder. That draws on the features of previous classes of a hero - the God in its capacity to create a world, the King in it's capacity to make rules and commands by which the given world runs.
The two additional types may be an Artist and a Scientist. While both may have the features of a World-builder. One I think aims to create objects of beauty that populate the world of the artists' school or while the other I think creates ever perfect models of reality with which to better understand and exist in the world.

Ignorance is a habit-forming product

Nir Eyal speaks of habit forming products. With the birth of low quality as a THING in entertainment that provides the best fit to the common denominator for the consumer and therefore catches the largest population one perceives the manufactured ignorance for the important themes, even the knowhow for survival in the modern world. As edutainment is fading as a market niche the rise of ignorance shines.
One glaring example may be the IT classes in schools that are turned into gaming dens.

Capital - 3 dimensions of growth

1. The number of individuals whose capital is growing increases.
2. The amount of income derived from overseas markets grows.
3. The market capitalises the growth, development and adoption of innovation.

Self-regulation and the Vice of Gaming

Adolescents play a lot of computer games in their teenage years and as the games have become very accessible to gamers so have they also reduced the number of hours spent in learning and in active education.

As part of the current essay I would like to show that the problem can be treated as an addiction and thus there are two things that can be done. First we could only diagnose people who have problems with gaming as such albeit indirectly. This is done by administering the self-regulation test. Secondly we could introduce a course where students learn to become conscious about how they feel during gaming. This has been shown to be twice as effective in another addiction therapy in helping people quit.
The possible third way would be to turn the syllabus into a game and let players play to their hearts content until they have mastered the topics. This however would be so difficult if we were to compete with the latest games all available freely as pirated software. Also most of the games that tend to be played are FPS and how could one turn knowledge and tests into an FPS. That would constitute a hard problem in game design though it has been tackled somewhat in one commercial release.
A self-regulation as an app for teenagers using the ASRI(Adolescent Self-Regulation Inventory) questions as a basis could be a good way to spot those who are not likely to do well at school. Studies have shown correlations with using drugs and other afflictions later in life.  So it can be used as part of the vetting process for entry to school. It can be also used as part of the monitoring system for children's progress and the ability to develop themselves.
 The app uses 36 questions and it indicates  three scales : overall, long-term and short-term self-regulation. "Self-regulated" describes a process of taking control of and evaluating one's own learning and behavior. Self regulation has 4 aspects:

Standards - of desirable behaviour
monitoring - of thoughts and emotions that precede breaking the standards;
motivation - to reach the standards; 
willpower - controlling the other urges.

Goal setting and planning and measuring your success are important aspects as well as not getting sidetracked by the things that more easily interest us, that includes social media and gaming.
I hope that the planned app would be of use in education in Estonia.

Recklessness and Self-Regulation

Why do most Mainstream Media channels use recklessness as a promotional tool in juvenile programming?

Perhaps it is too easy to see this programing in malevolent light, and to see it as serving the need to prime the customers for alcohol and tobacco markets and drug use/prison industry.
On the other hand it could also act as a filter and point for self-reflection that is bound to follow at some point for most people. A spree of juvenile recklessness and rioting may form the basis for a practice of self-regulation, to build the character in positive light and avoid the tragedy of downward spiral in life.
The shakers for example have such a time reserved for every young man's start for adult life.
So even if for some time life became dysfunctional; that could paradoxically turn out to make life functional again.

Civilizing Process and reduction of violence in open societies

Perhaps there is a process that reduces violence by a recursive process until it becomes very very low and almost totally eradicated.
First process delegates violence to the state until a monopoly is achieved.As societies increasingly turn to democracy and open society it would be also an increasing trend that the monopoly of violence is withdrawn from individuals and minority groups.
Second process reduces the amount of violence a state can exact on its people as the people are in control of this monopoly of violence. And they would not like to to be on the receiving end of their own punishments.
As the first process is followed by the second and the second increases the first in turn a loop emerges that recreates itself  like the Ouroboros snake that eats its own tale.